As a little girl I used to spend hours gazing into the mirror. Eye to eye. Why these eyes? Why this face? Why this body?
What if it’s not me? And these aren’t my eyes, or my face, or my body?
What if I – with these eyes and face and body that I just glimpsed – what if all this is just a memory of some old woman I’ll become some day?
Often I used to pretend there were really two of me. Like twin sisters. Me and her. Like in the fairy tales: one bad and one good. Me the well-behaved one, and her the hooligan.
I used to wear my hair long, my mother was always nagging at me to comb it. And she took the scissors and snipped the plait off out of spite.
We used to have theatre shows at the dacha and, of course, she played all the leading roles, and I opened and closed the curtain. And then once, in the course of the action, she was supposed to kill herself. Just imagine it, she says her final words with a knife in her hand, then swings and hits her head as hard as she can, and suddenly she’s covered in real blood. Everybody jumped to their feet in horror, and she’s lying there dying – in the play, and from sheer delight as well. Only I knew that she’d grated some beetroot, taken a hen’s egg and sucked it out through a little hole and used a syringe she took from Mummy to squirt the juice into the egg and hidden it in her wig. She jumped up, all covered in beetroot blood, squealing in joy at having fooled everyone:
‘You believed it! You believed it!’
You simply can’t imagine what it’s like having to put up with her all the time! You can’t imagine what it’s like to wear her cast-offs after she’s done with them. They always bought beautiful new things for her, that princess without a pea, and I got the same things, already old and disgusting, to wear out. They deck us out for school after the summer holidays, and she has nice new shoes, but I have to get into her old raincoat with holes in the pockets and a stain on the lapel.
She tormented me all my childhood, whenever she fancied. I remember I drew a white chalk boundary line on the floor, divided our room in half. She went and rubbed it out and drew the line so that I could only walk round the edge from my bed to the table and the door. It was pointless complaining to Mummy, because with Mummy she was an absolute angel, but when we were left alone, she started pinching me and pulling my hair until it really hurt, so that I wouldn’t snitch on her.
I’ll never forget the time I was given a wonderful doll, a huge talking doll that closed and opened its eyes and could even walk. Just as soon as I turned away for a moment, my tormentor stripped her naked, saw there was something missing, and drew it on. I started crying and went running to my parents – they just laughed.
It was impossible to come to terms with her! I suggest something, and she stamps her little foot and declares:
‘Things will be the way I say round here, or else there won’t be anything at all!’
Her eyes narrow, looking daggers at me, and her upper lip twitches too, exposing her sharp little teeth. She’s going to grab me any moment …
I remember how scared I was when Mummy asked me who I was talking to. I lied:
‘Myself.’
I realise that it used to happen when I wanted to be loved. She appeared when I had to fight for other people’s love. That is, almost all the time – even when I was on my own. But never with Daddy. With Daddy everything was different.
He called Mummy and me the same name – we were both bunnies. He probably enjoyed shouting: ‘Bunny!’ – and we would both answer, one from the kitchen and one from the nursery.
When he came home, in order not to let any strangers in, before I opened the door I had to ask:
‘Who’s there?’
He used to answer: ‘A sower and mower and tin-whistle blower.’
Even when he wiped his feet on the mat in the hallway it came out like a dance.
He liked to bring me strange presents. He used to say:
‘Guess what!’
But it was absolutely impossible to guess. It could be a fan, or a tea bowl, or a lorgnette, a tea caddy, an empty scent bottle or a broken camera. Once he brought a Japanese Noh theatre mask. He even brought home a genuine elephant’s foot from somewhere, hollowed out for umbrellas and canes. Mummy used to rant at him, but his presents made me feel absolutely happy.
He could suddenly say, out of the blue:
‘Forget that homework!’
And then we would put on a concert. We loved humming on combs wrapped in tissue paper – it tickled my lips terribly. An empty cake box became a tambourine. He used to turn up the corner of the carpet and rattle out a tap dance on the floor, until the neighbours started banging. Or grab the box of chess pieces and start shaking it rhythmically, so that everything inside it rattled about.
He made me play chess with him and he always won, and when he got me in checkmate, he was as delighted as a little child.
He knew all the dances in the world and he taught me to dance. I don’t know why, but I really loved the Hawaiian dance – we used to keep our hands in our pockets when we did it.
One day at the table he told me to stop being so silly and stubborn or he’d pour a glass of kefir over my head.
I said:
‘No you won’t!’
And suddenly I was covered in white kefir goo. Mummy was horrified, but I was cock-a-hoop.
I never had to fight for his love.
But when Daddy wasn’t there, that other me persecuted me incessantly.
I always suffered agonies with my skin, but hers was smooth and clear. Skin isn’t just a sack for your insides, it’s what the world uses to touch us. The world’s feeler. And skin problems are just a way of protecting yourself from being touched. You sit there, hidden away, like inside a cocoon. But she – the other me – didn’t understand any of this. She didn’t understand that I was afraid of everything, and above all of being with other people. She didn’t understand how, when we went visiting and everybody was enjoying themselves, I could lock myself in the toilet and just sit there without even taking my knickers off. She didn’t understand how I could learn the theorems of Pythagoras off by heart, but freeze up in terror beside the blackboard, leave my body and float round in the air, watching myself from the outside – helpless, pitiful, desolate. The only fact about Pythagoras that remained in my head was how when he was a child and his parents showed him the basic forms through which the invisible manifests itself to human beings on a little table – globe, pyramid, cube, scraps of wool, apples, honey cakes and a little pitcher of wine – and named them all, Pythagoras listened to their explanations and then knocked the table over.
I always wrote her compositions for her. And I always got ‘D’. And even worse, the teacher used to read them out in class and sigh:
‘Sashenka, life is going to be hard for you.’
She gave me a D, because I always wrote about the wrong thing. We were given three subjects to choose from, we had to write about the first one, the second one or the third one – but I always wrote about God knows what. God knows what was more important to me.
I was a monster from a species of gill-winged, brachiopod moss animals. But she was the Dance of Mahanaim, with eyes like the pools in Heshbon, by the gate of Bath-rabbim. I remember how shocked I was by the way our PT teacher looked at her during class.
One day I was getting changed after school and I noticed someone spying on me through binoculars from behind the curtain in a window of the house opposite. I squatted down below the windowsill in horror, but she started putting on a full-scale performance.
When I was little, to frighten me at night she used to tell me she was a witch and she had power over people. And her proof for that was her eyes – the left one was blue, and the right one was brown. And she told me she used to have warts, and when we stayed the night at someone else’s place, she washed herself with the sponge in that house, and her warts disappeared, but they appeared on the child who lived there. But the main argument, of course, was her eyes. She told me she could
put the evil eye on anyone she wanted. The other girls weren’t exactly afraid of her, but they were wary. She could definitely charm blood – she only had to lick a cut and whisper something, and the bleeding stopped.
Even now she won’t leave me in peace. And you can never tell when she’ll appear again. She can disappear and be gone for months, then suddenly – Here I am, surprise, surprise!
She mocks me because in the library, out of pity for the dead authors nobody wants, I take the most neglected books – otherwise no one will even remember about these writers. Such a slovenly trollop, she says, but you underline the ideas you like so neatly with a comb. She strikes a pose and lectures me, like an older sister: You can’t live your life like a wishy-washy dishrag, you have to learn to be pushier than a lamb and louder than a mouse. Remember the seventeenth rule of Thales of Miletus, my little sister: It is better to arouse envy than pity!
And how viciously she used to tease you!
Remember, we were sitting on the veranda, eating strawberries – sour and unappetising, we were dipping them in sugar. And she got the idea of dipping them in honey. She pours some honey out of the jar into her saucer and licks the spoon. And she looks at you. And checks her expression in the mirror. I know that expression only too well, with the gleeful malice blazing in that odd pair of eyes.
She licked the spoon, took the end of it between her finger and thumb and flung it through the open veranda window behind her.
And she looks at you.
‘Fetch!’
I tried to shout out to you: ‘Stop! Don’t you dare do that!’ But I couldn’t force out a single word.
You got up and went to look for the spoon – and there were thickets of brambles and wild raspberry bushes out there. You came back all scratched, with beads of blood on your hands. Without saying a word, you put the spoon on the table – with the earth and dry grass sticking to it – and turned and walked away.
She simply pulls a wry face at the dirty spoon. Then, as if nothing has happened, she carries on dipping strawberries in honey and biting them with her little teeth.
I couldn’t stand it, I dashed after you, grabbed hold of your arm, tried to lick your scratches the way she did, to stop the bleeding, but you shoved me away.
‘Go to hell!’
And you looked at me with such contempt.
You got on your bike and rode off.
How I hated you then!
That is, I hated her.
Both of you!
And I really, really wanted something to happen to you, something bad, terrible, evil.
I told myself I wouldn’t go to you.
And I went running to you the very next day.
I see it all again, as if it’s happening right now, feel it on my skin: It’s been drizzling since morning, the mist has clambered up the fence, all the paths are drowned in puddles. I’m walking to your place with an umbrella over my head, and on the bridge across the ravine the rain starts coming down even harder.
There’s a small stretch of forest between our dachas, all the footpaths there have dissolved into mud, and all the greenery sprouting there is nameless – it was only you who gave the plants their names.
I walk past your neighbours on the corner, peep over the fence at the roses – huge and heavy, like heads of cabbage. They’re even more fragrant in the rain.
I felt afraid to walk up the steps onto the porch, I folded the umbrella and sneaked across to the veranda windows. I went up on tiptoe and saw you there inside the rainy window panes. You’re lying on the divan, with your bandaged foot up on its back, reading some thick volume.
You see, I wished you ill, and you fell off your bike into the ditch.
Now you know why you twisted your ankle that evening and ended up lounging about in bed.
I stood there in the rain and looked at you. You sensed something, looked up, saw me, smiled.
Yes, Sashenka, my dacha girl, how long ago that was, and in some quite different, faraway life.
It was so good to lie there and write all sorts of nonsense in my diary, listening to the rain rustling on the roof and the mosquitoes buzzing on the veranda. If I look out of the window, the apple trees have no feet in the mist. The clothes pegs on the washing line are soaking wet and the water is dripping off them.
The rain makes it dark for reading – I switch on the light in the middle of the day.
I set a huge tome of Shakespeare on my knees – it’s convenient for putting my notebook on when I write.
Do you know what I was writing about then? About Hamlet. Or rather, about myself and how my father had died, or maybe he hadn’t, and my mother had married someone else, who was blind into the bargain, but I absolutely can’t understand why everyone has to harass each other and run each other through with pointed instruments – and it doesn’t even flood the stage with blood. What if they all die without any contrived acts of dastardly villainy and subtle scheming, just like that, all by themselves, after they’ve lived their lives – does that mean it wouldn’t be Hamlet any more? Why, it’s even more frightening. His father’s ghost – so what? A bogeyman for little children.
And as for that poison poured into his ear!
And why does all of it only start when he comes back to his father’s castle, wasn’t he Hamlet before all that? Even before anything has happened, before the curtain has opened, before Bernardo and Francisco have started squabbling – all that may be specified precisely in the general service regulations, but he’s already Hamlet, isn’t he?
And that’s the most interesting thing of all, surely – what happened to them before all these encounters with ghosts, poisonings and stupid theatrical tricks, like hiding behind the arras?
He was just getting on with life – the way I live. Without any deathbed monologues in verse.
And his life before that should be written. For instance, how he played at postmen when he was little – he used to take an armful of old newspapers and stuff them into all the postboxes. And how during the breaks between lessons at school he used to hide away with a book in the cloakroom and the library – the weakest and most cowardly boys used to taunt him, getting their own back for what they had suffered from others. By the way, do you know what was the first thing that disenchanted me with literature? I’d read how the medieval jesters used to ask their lords tricky questions and the lords tried to answer them with painstaking correctness, and every time they just made fools of themselves, so during the break I tried asking my tormentors something artlessly ironic, but they just slapped me round the ears without even bothering to listen to me!
And in addition people ought to be told about the time when one day Hamlet was bathing in a lake and this man swam up to him and said: ‘You swim quite well, boy, but your style’s a bit messy. Let me show you!’ And then this swimming teacher supported him from underneath with one hand and his other hand kept slipping down off the boy’s stomach, lower and lower, as if by accident.
And about the dovecot. In my childhood, when we still lived in the old apartment, our neighbour had a dovecot in the courtyard, and when he was waiting for his pigeons to come back from a flight he didn’t look up into the heavens, but into a basin of water – he could see the sky better like that was how he explained it.
I also wrote that I wanted to become myself. I still wasn’t me. It wasn’t possible that this could be me. I wanted to break out of the calendar.
And look, now I have.
It’s a good thing you can’t see where I am now and what I’m surrounded by. But if I don’t describe it, it’s as if it doesn’t exist at all.
Remember those beautiful stones you had on your shelf, the ones you brought back home from the seaside once upon a time? One day you took a round pebble and put it in your eye, like a monocle. I took that pebble away and it used to lie on my windowsill, watching me all the time. Then suddenly I realised that it really is the pupil of someone’s eye. And it can see me. And not only me, but absolutely everything. Because
before that pebble can even blink, everything will flash past in front of it and disappear – me and this room and this town outside the window. At that moment I realised the absolute insignificance of all the books I had read and all the notebooks I had filled up with writing, and I felt very upset. I was seized by this terrible anxiety. I suddenly realised that in fact that pupil simply couldn’t see my room or me and couldn’t have seen them even if it wanted to, because for it I would flash past so quickly, it wouldn’t notice a thing. It’s real, it exists, but do I really exist for it?
Do I even exist for myself?
What does it mean to exist? Is it to know that you were? To demonstrate your existence with your memories?
What are my arms, my legs, my moles, my intestines gurgling with pearl barley, my bitten fingernails and my scrotum to this stone? My thalamus? My childhood memories? One New Year’s Day I woke up early in the morning and ran to the tree in my bare feet to look at the presents. There were guests sleeping all over the room, but there was nothing under the tree – the presents had been bought, but after the champagne and vodka they had simply forgotten to put them out. I went to the kitchen and cried there until my mother got up. Is that stupid?
Probably, in order to become real, you have to exist, not in your own awareness, which is so uncertain and subject to the influence of sleep, for instance, when even you don’t know if you’re alive or not, but in the awareness of another person. And not just any person, but one for whom it is important to know that you exist. You know that I exist. And here, where everything is topsy-turvy, that makes me real.
When I was still a child I avoided death by a miracle – I got up at night to go to the toilet and the book shelves collapsed onto the bed.
But I only started thinking seriously about my own death for the first time at school in a zoology lesson. We had an old teacher, an invalid, and he warned us to put a tablet from his pocket in his mouth if he ever fell unconscious. We put the tablet in, but it didn’t help.
He always used to wipe his glasses with his tie.
The Light and the Dark Page 3